Lots To Chirp About At Benefit For 15,000 Kids

May 20, 1990|By Barbara Mahany.

The squeak was not to be missed.

Thus, upon gliding into the Soiree Pour Les Enfants, an elegant French garden party punctuated by the most confounding symphony of chirps, 750 friends of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago craned their necks and squinted in vain as they tried to zero in on the source at the Chicago Hilton and Towers on Friday night.

Over flutes of champagne and asparagus tips wrapped in prosciutto, the enlightened crowd offered these theories as to the origin of the squeak:

- A flock of sparrows was nesting in a crystal chandelier.

- The air conditioning was in dire need of lubrication.

- Someone had better hire a new violinist before the canape platters were picked clean.

``We had more trouble with those birds,`` informed Homer Sharp, the wizard of design from Marshall Field & Co., who had been recruited to turn the oversized hotel hall into an intimate Renaissance garden. ``We went through four tapes before we found that. One had an announcer who kept interrupting to give the name of the bird, and another spelled out the history of each bird. Can you imagine that during cocktails?``

Besides the ornithological authenticity, Sharp-the man who for 44 years has brought Chicago its beloved State Street store Christmas tree-and his crew hand-painted 90 blue silk tablecloths with gold fleurs-de-lis, combed the city for 800 gold Versailles chairs, netted 500 stuffed birds and 300 nests and-in a last-minute climatological disaster-watched the wind blow the blossoms off 1,200 cherry and dogwood branches, the intended ingredients for 5-foot trees that were supposed to bloom forth from each dinner table. (A last-minute switch to silk blossoms did the trick.)

All this to meet the expectations of a crowd that has come to equate the 41-year-old Boys & Girls Clubs ball with the most elegant of social occasions. Also, as one of the last parties turned out by Field`s before the retailer changes hands to Dayton-Hudson, outgoing Field`s Chairman Phil Miller, whose trademark is nothing if not elegance, ``pulled out all the stops,`` soiree co- chairman Ann Gray said. (Miller was in New York, so he missed the squeaks and the decor that he`d paid for.)

Elegance is only part of the equation. Michael Murray, executive director of the clubs, tore through a list of other equations-numerical translations of what the $450,000 netted from this $200-a-ticket dinner means to the 13 clubs that keep 15,000 youngsters off some of this city`s meanest streets.

``We get enough money from this party alone to keep one (club) open 365 days for one year,`` he said. ``Without this party, we wouldn`t be able to serve 1,200 kids. Or go another route, we`d have to lay off 20 staff members without this. Or how about, close all our (clubs) one day a week.``

``There`s lots of equations, you can go any way,`` said Murray, who regards the clubs` Woman`s Board as the hardest-working, no-nonsense volunteer fundraising board he`s seen in his 30-year career.

``I sometimes wonder if the Woman`s Board realizes just how significant this party is.``